Congress Thursday night passed a two-year budget plan with billions of dollars in new domestic and defense spending. Senator Rand Paul was a lonely voice of dissent. When Trump first took office, over half of voters thought significant cuts in spending were likely, but that hope has been fading.

Forty-two percent (42%) of voters now say the country is headed in the right direction, the highest level of optimism since last April. This finding ran in the mid- to upper 20s for most of Obama’s last full year in office.

-- The United States is expected to begin pulling troops out of Iraq after the government there declared victory over the radical Islamic State Group (ISIS), and more voters now agree that America and its allies have won that war.

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